In order to improve the investment efficiency to an IT system for a company, the needs are growing for consolidation of information platform systems. On one hand, it is considered, on one hand, that a server, a router, and a storage system constructed so far in individual housings are to be integrated into a single housing. On the other hand, companies are urged to have their services equipped with more advanced features by spreading of Web services. In order to develop various new services rapidly, and to provide the customer therewith, the information platform system for processing the services must be able to be flexibly changed into a configuration suitable for the services.
Generally, with a router or a storage system, a dedicated adapter is equipped, as a means for improving performance, and providing advanced-features. An embedded processor is integrated on the dedicated adapter, and thereon an embedded OS and firmware are run. Advanced features realized by these dedicated adapters are, for example, such as processing of a network processor in the router, and control processing of RAID (Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks) in the storage device. Since the processing of a network processor or the RAID control processing requires a large amount of calculation power, it is more reasonable to utilize general purpose high performance processors instead of using an embedded processor, in order to realize further improvement in performance, and to provide the router or storage device with advanced-functions.
On the other hand, in the case of a server system, compared with a router or a storage system, the server is more advanced in commodity. For example, multiple server blades are connected to a high-speed backplane for a general server blade.
Multiple high performance processors are mounted on each server blade, wherein software is installed.
With the server system composed of multipurpose parts, the configuration of server is made flexible, and the technique of provisioning is used in order to make management of multiple server blades easier. By this technique, an OS is installed into a diskless server blade from a remote storage. For example, a technique of automatically assigning a CPU resource for a rack blade computer is disclosed in JP-A No. 110791/2004. A technique of assigning an OS and applications from a remote storage area is also disclosed in JP-A No. 110791/2004. By these techniques, responding to a customer's needs, the OS or applications can be changed without changing the hardware of a single server blade.
Generally, when the server accesses an I/O device such as a network or a storage device, it is necessary to mount a physical adapter for the I/O device. For example, in connecting the server to a LAN network, a NIC (Network Interface Card) is mounted, and in connecting the server to a SAN (Storage Area Network), a HBA (Host Bus Adapter) is mounted. When the server accesses to a network or storage, the adapter is accessed through the driver software for the physical adapter mounted on the server and a request is sent out to the target I/O device from the adapter. The technique of mounting separate HBA (Host Bus Adapter) in each server blade as a technique accessing SAN from a blade type server is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,771,499.
Now, as mentioned above, the dedicated adapter is conventionally used with the router or the storage system, and I/O adapters, and such as NIC and HBA, were used with the server. Conventionally, with these adapters the firmware on the adapter performs data transfer processing relevant to an I/O request. Or in the case of a high-performance adapter, protocol processing is also performed. Such firmware was mounted on the storage, such as a ROM. Therefore, it was difficult to remove the firmware in the case of updating due to a fault etc., and to change the firmware itself. For example, the method of updating the firmware of the specific adapter is disclosed in JP-A No. 137598/2000. By this method, the firmware of the network processor adapter of router can be updated, or the firmware of the adapter for RAID controllers for the storage device can be updated. That is, the firmware of the dedicated adapter mounted on various devices can be updated.